It won’t be an overstatement to say that 100% of employers want their staffers to be productive at work, reaching or even overstepping their performance goals every single day. Who doesn’t?!
Yet, only 13% of teams accomplish 70% of planned tasks weekly and spend nearly two hours (daily!) on unproductive work. Hybrid and remote employee productivity is even more challenging. In fact, 60% of managers still worry that employees are less productive when working from home.
So, how can you build a more productive team?
The answer is in this article. It contains the best team building ideas to give your productivity a powerful and quick jolt forward, whether in the office, hybrid, or remote environment. Plus, we’ve gathered several productive work strategies from experts—find them at the bottom.
Table of Contents
- Fast Team Building Exercises for Higher Productivity
- Productivity-Boosting Activities for Remote or Hybrid Teams
- In-Person Team-Building Ideas to Improve Productivity
- How to Build a Highly Productive Team—Expert Advice
- Skyrocket Your Team’s Productivity with Outback Team Building
- Author Bio
Fast Team Building Exercises for Higher Productivity
5-Minute Drills
Productivity skills: Ideation, delegation, task prioritization, time management, communication, etc.
Turbo-charge productivity in your team with 5-minute exercises like these:
- The 5-Minute Brainstorm or Speedstorming → Generate as many ideas as possible in five minutes or less.
- Delegation Domino → Create an imaginary list of tasks and set a timer for employees to delegate those.
- Lightning-Fast Feedback → Stage role-playing situations when your team members will formulate constructive peer feedback within a set timeframe.
- Calendar Tetris → Reorganize a nightmarish to-do list into an adequate workday schedule.
- Priority Puzzle → Prepare a heap of tasks and prioritize them for one workday.
For example:
The University of Rhode Island professors turned to speedstorming as productive team building in education.
Minute To Win It
Productivity skills: Strategizing, decision-making, group coordination, quick reaction under pressure
Hurry up, the clock is ticking!
“Minute To Win It” is a set of giggle-full and fast mini-challenges for teams to tackle in only 60 seconds. It’s a huge energetic booster with over 50 different team tasks, from balancing pencils to stacking cups.
For example:
Outback arranged this team building activity for productive teams at Johnson & Johnson, Vertiv, and Balzer & Associates, among many other companies.
Quick Meditation Sessions
Productivity skills: Concentration, mindfulness, stress management
Now, how about switching on a meditative mode for about two or five deeply focused minutes to battle fatigue and recharge your emotional “batteries” for better performance?
For that, switch off everything disturbing or distracting your workers (phones, emails, chats, etc.) and indulge in fast team-building activities to meditate and relax:
- Simple yoga poses
- Mindful breathing
- Five-sense grounding (in silence, observe one thing you can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste)
- Mantra repetition
- Thought-cloud exercise (imagine thoughts as clouds drifting by)
For example:
As a part of their mindfulness journey, Zucol Group holds quick, at-the-desk meditation sessions for employees to pause and regain mental clarity.
Productivity-Boosting Activities for Remote or Hybrid Teams
Online Meetings for Productivity Swaps
Productivity skills: Knowledge-sharing, tool awareness, growth mindset
Is it simply another call via Zoom or Google Meet?
We saw this thought coming from a mile away.
This virtual team building for productivity shouldn’t be just one more meeting with a side of yawns. It should be an engaging show-and-tell swap of effective work strategies.
It can be anything productivity-related:
- Tip
- Habit
- Book
- App/tool
- Digital resource (newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel)
Let your team members reveal their secret “scrolls” of digital wisdom, even the weirdest but super-effective tactics. Remember: No judging!
Virtual Escape Rooms
Productivity skills: Collaboration, time management, problem-solving, decision-making
Lock your team in a digital room and give them only one hour to run away by solving clues (virtually).
No, this is not one of those workplace horror stories from the Black Mirror series where the employer “locks” employees in a virtual simulation (like USS Callister, for instance). This could be a fun-tastic corporate escape room experience for your team. The only way out is through brain-racking and teamwork.
At Outback, you can pick any of these online escape rooms for your remote team building to boost productivity:
Digital Clean-Up Challenges
Productivity skills: Self-discipline, organization, decluttering
What if your employees’ inboxes are overstuffed with unnecessary emails? Or what if their content management system or cloud storage is cluttered with hundreds (if not thousands) of files without even proper names? How can they possibly be productive with such a digital mess around?
In the words of Samuel Charmetant, Founder of ArtMajeur by YourArt, “No matter how you justify digital cluttering—perhaps as ‘creative mess’—it won’t stop being a major productivity killer. Effective workspace arrangement is the key to remaining productive, even for creatives like graphic designers or artists.
And no matter your industry, you may schedule an inbox clean-up challenge for your team or tidy up your internal system and get rid of outdated docs/spreadsheets or useless screenshots you took months ago—whatever helps you create a more organized digital workspace.”
Such “digital spring cleanings” are great virtual team-building ideas for higher productivity.
For example:
The Terrace team embarked on a digital tidying-up mission to clean their mailboxes, SharePoint folders, chats, and more.
In-Person Team-Building Ideas to Improve Productivity
Build-Up Challenges
Productivity skills: Goal-setting, resource management, team coordination, creative problem-solving
Can your team construct a mini-copy of the Eiffel Tower merely out of spaghetti and tape?
Don’t hesitate to dare them and see. Push your team members out of their comfort zones and engage in creative brainstorming and building:
- The Marshmallow Tower
- Domino Effect Challenge
- The Longest Spaghetti Bridge
- The Highest Cup Pyramid
- Cardboard Boat-Building Challenge
- The Farthest-Throwing Catapult
Amazing Chases
Productivity skills: Strategic thinking, collaboration, problem-solving, agility
The Amazing Chase is by far one of the most popular outdoor team building activities to boost productivity among Outback’s clients. This race-style scavenger hunt reveals and highlights everyone’s unique strengths while completing city-wide challenges.
Just pick your city in the USA or Canada, and don’t forget to snap pics of your thrilling journey while you compete in teams to solve tasks and earn points.
For example:
PlentyOfFish and Nestlé have already chosen this activity prepared by Outback in their cities: Whistler and Toronto.
Stressful, Overloaded Workday Simulations
Productivity skills: Focus, stress and time management, critical thinking, resilience
Have you ever tried to simulate office madness on purpose?
It sounds like a totally crazy idea, doesn’t it?
Yet, it can be the right problem-solving team building to see how your staffers behave under pressure. Imitate a scenario where everything (literally!) goes wrong during a simulated workday:
- The inbox is getting flooded with emails.
- Technical issues are popping up as if out of nowhere.
- “Fake” clients (played by several employees) are constantly making angry calls.
For example:
This can be a great team-building idea for customer support teams or contact centers. Ideally, they should avoid drops in support or contact center performance while staying calm and resilient, thinking critically, and managing time and stress effectively in a tough situation like this.
How to Build a Highly Productive Team—Expert Advice
Use Productivity Tools
As the late CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, once said, “You cannot mandate productivity; you must provide the tools to let people become their best.”
So, whether you’re working remotely or in the office, your first step is to hand your employees the right toolset to help them reveal their highest potential and achieve peak performance.
It may include the following tools:
- For task and project management → Wrike, Asana, Trello
- For tracking work hours → Memtime, Toggl Track, TMetric
- For team communication and collaboration → Staffbase, Microsoft Teams, Slack
- For blocking distractions and concentrating on tasks → Pomofocus, SelfControl, HeyFocus
- For file management → Google Drive, eFileCabinet, Microsoft OneDrive
For example:
As many as 73% of Fortune 500 companies are Asana customers, and Microsoft Teams is the most preferred collaborative platform among businesses (used by 31%).
Learn to Communicate More Productively
Productive Communication During Conflicts
There’s no point denying it—conflicting employees are counterproductive. That’s why it’s essential to help them develop effective communication skills to resolve workplace conflicts smarter and faster:
- Active listening
- Clarifying and paraphrasing
- Switching on emotional intelligence
- Asking open-ended questions
- Making empathetic statements
- Avoiding passive-aggressive non-verbal signals (sarcastic smirks, eye rolls, exaggerated sighs, etc.)
If you need to embrace all the skills, you can opt for Outback’s all-in-one conflict resolution training.
Productive Communication During Meetings
Now, let’s move on to effective meetings in the workplace.
Did you know that 71% of managers consider their team gatherings unproductive and inefficient? And poor communication is one of the root causes.
Adam Young, CEO and Founder of Event Tickets Center (ETC), remarks: “Every team meeting should be built on visually aided communication through handouts, presentations, videos, screen recordings, and so on. Only then can it be effective as your team members will exchange information more concisely and clearly. Sometimes, a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, saving hours of productive time during meetings.”
For example:
Visual aids make an invaluable part of employees’ communicative arsenal amid corporate gatherings and events at ETC.
Introduce Productive Practices at Work
What productivity exercises can you make habitual in your company?
Here are several ideas to give you a hint:
- Goal setting: SMART goals or the Seinfeld Method (aka don’t-break-the-chain)
- Work prioritization: The Pareto principle or task-batching
- Time management: The Pomodoro technique or time-blocking
- Focus control: Single-tasking (instead of multitasking) or deep work mode
- Delegation: The 70% rule or the “What-When-Why” format
- Brainstorming: Mind-mapping or role-storming
You can also discuss, learn, and apply all the habits driving the top performers in Outback’s program: 8 Productive Practices of Peak Performing People.
For Peter Čuček, Owner of Tuuli, “Employee productivity isn’t only about pushing hard and working more; it’s also about knowing when to stop and relax the brain and body muscles. Taking quality rest is also a productive exercise that both employers and employees often forget.” At this point, he recommends “mindful breaks as a daily healthy ritual for your team’s success, whether a short eye-relax break or a lengthier massage therapy.”
Skyrocket Your Team’s Productivity with Outback Team Building
Work smarter (not harder), train your team better, and give your employee productivity a boost (and a break!) with professional development programs and corporate team building activities at Outback.
Are you ready to orbit peak performance and stay there? Contact Outback!
Author Bio
Catherine Schwartz is an author who specializes in employee well-being and engagement.
